Donna Has Left the Building

by Susan Jane Gilman

  “C’mon, I’m not Joey right now, okay? I’m Zsa-Zsa, the bad little girlie French maid.”

  But why would I want to spank a little girl?

  “I’m not doing this.” I crossed my arms.

  “Please, mistress. Just try,” Joey urged in his simpering falsetto. “I’m Zsa-Zsa. A girlie-man, a big sissy, who’s submissive and helpless. I need to be disciplined, mistress. I’ve been a very bad girl.”

  I suppose because his femme voice irritated me so much, I drew my hand back and hit him on the ass with the fish spatula. When the nonstick stainless steel connected with his skin, I flinched, but Joey didn’t seem to even feel it. “That’s it. You can go much harder. You’re not going to hurt me,” he said affably. “Don’t worry, if anything gets too intense, I’ll say our safe word.”

  Right. Regis Philbin.

  I spanked him two or three times with the fish spatula, then the batter-scraper, then the wooden spoon, then the burger-flipper. What can I say? It was one for the record books, though nothing I was ever going to mention in our annual Christmas newsletter. A few times, it was actually hard to keep from giggling. In the end, though, Joey and I agreed that the fish spatula was the best. It handled well, and my husband said the slotted surface distributed the pain nice and evenly. There was something satisfying about having a little consensus between us. Finally, we could get down to business.

  “Mistress Moyet,” Joey said in his girlie voice. “I’m Zsa-Zsa, a prissy little Sissy Maid. How can I serve you today?”

  This, I had prepared for. I called up a list on my iPad. A lot of it was lifted directly from my own to-do list, but why reinvent the wheel?

  Pick up dry cleaning.

  Buy self birthday present & wrap.

  Flea collars for Mr. Noodles.

  Renew car registration.

  Prescription refills.

  Since these required Joey to go outside, I focused on the next item on my list:

  “Okay, Zsa-Zsa,” I said. “Today we’re—I mean—you—you’re going to bake gluten-free brownies for my book club.”

  I could see his smile waver a bit behind his makeup; it seemed this might not be what he’d initially had in mind. Yet I told myself to ignore it: How much time did I spend cooking each day? Now, it was his turn.

  “Yes, mistress,” he said obediently.

  “Here’s the recipe,” I said, tapping it open on my screen. “Take a look, get a sense of it, okay? First, let’s assemble all the ingredients here on the counter in a mise-en-place, so we don’t have to keep running back and forth, all right? We’re going to need some brown rice flour and some brown sugar to start, so if you could go to the pantry, please, and—”

  “Regis Philbin,” Joey said abruptly. I stopped. Switching back to his own bass voice, he said, “Donna, as my mistress, don’t be polite, okay? Don’t say ‘let’s,’ or ‘if you could,’ all right? Say, ‘Read that recipe. Fetch the ingredients.’ The whole point is to command me to do stuff. Take control over me. And don’t have me walk to the pantry. Remember what the websites said about emasculating me? Make me skip—or, better yet—crawl. Really humiliate me.”

  I looked at him dubiously. “Okaaay.”

  “Look, wave your paddle around if you need to.” He gestured toward the fish spatula. “And call me Zsa-Zsa. I think that’ll help you get into the role-playing more.”

  We tried it again. “Zsa-Zsa, read this recipe for gluten-free vegan brownies,” I shouted, slapping the side of the counter with the fish spatula.

  “Yes, mistress.” Dutifully, Joey studied my iPad.

  “Now, recite it back to me,” I ordered.

  “Yes, mistress.” He recited it back to me.

  “Now, skip into the pantry and fetch the ingredients.” I added, “One by one. Rice flour first.”

  Joey skipped into the pantry; in his flouncy petticoats, he reminded me of the little pirouetting elephant in Fantasia. Skipping back, he placed the rice flour on the counter with a mincing, exaggerated curtsy.

  “Don’t look so pleased,” I said. “You’ve got nine more ingredients to go. This time, crawl.”

  It was odd. As a saleswoman, I’d never say to a customer: “Chop the cilantro.” It was always: “I’m sorry, Arianna, but while I start sautéing the onion and ginger, would you mind cutting up some cilantro for me? Great. Thanks so much.” Being direct now felt strange and counterintuitive. But also: liberating.

  As soon as I said “crawl,” my husband dropped to his hands and knees and started crawling into the pantry, wiggling his ruffled behind back and forth cowishly. It was starting to feel like bona fide make-believe, the way you play when you’re a child—Everybody pretend to go to sleep now! your friend says, and then you all roll over onto your sides and snore exaggeratedly. And having Joey jump at my every command? I had to say, it was thrilling.

  Yet a moment later, he called out, “Regis Philbin.” Then, in his regular voice: “Donna, where’s the brown sugar?”

  Oh, you’re shitting me, I thought. Really? “It’s right there on the second shelf,” I shouted.

  “I’m looking. It’s not here.”

  “Yes, it is. Check behind the baking soda.”

  “Is that the stuff in the orange box?”

  “Does the orange box say ‘baking soda’ on it?”

  “I dunno. I can’t see. I don’t have my glasses.”

  I yanked off my stilettos again and stomped into the pantry. “The brown sugar is right there,” I said with annoyance, pointing. “In the big brown box that says ‘Brown Sugar’ on it. Right behind the little orange box of baking soda that says—wait for it—‘baking soda.’”

  “Oh,” he said defensively. “I could’ve sworn it wasn’t there a minute ago.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I muttered. How exactly was I the one in power here? I didn’t want to have to walk him through baking the damn brownies: I just wanted it done.

  Joey ratcheted his voice up two octaves and resumed his exaggerated, feminine gestures. “I’m so sorry, Mistress Moyet. It’s just so hard for a bad little Sissy Maid like me to read these teeny-tiny letters. Following a recipe is just so complicated for a little girlie-girl. I’m so weak and helpless and at your mercy. And I’ve displeased you, I can see. So I need to be punished.”

  With that, he turned around on all fours, pulled down his bloomers and tights, and exposed his ass to me, again. “I will submit to whatever horrible and degrading punishment you think this bad little girlie-girl deserves,” he chirped.

  What?

  “You can spank me and tell me how naughty I am,” he prompted. “You can make me drink water from Mr. Noodles’s dog dish and tell me what a pathetic little sissy I am in my lace panties and my sissy dress and my girlie bra. You can pour the brown sugar all over the pantry floor and make me lick it up with my pink sissy tongue. Punish me, mistress, until I learn to cook and bake and clean and do everything exactly the way you do.”

  He went on suggesting different punishments and humiliations, but I had stopped listening. Exactly the way you do? Excuse me? Was this what my husband really thought “being a woman” boiled down to—wearing lipstick and lacy panties? Being frilly and silly and helpless? Baking?

  Was this how he saw me? In the twenty-first century?

  Drawing my arm back, I slapped him as hard as I could across the ass with the fish spatula. He visibly shuddered. “Yes, Mistress Moyet. Thank you, mistress,” he said. “I’m a bad, bad Sissy Maid, aren’t I?”

  Why was being “girlie” and “sissy” so synonymous with shame anyway? I thought suddenly. What was so inherently degrading about housework? For all the years I’d managed our household—even while working full-time myself—had he secretly thought it was a joke? That what I’d been doing was actually somehow infantile and shameful and beneath him? With a swoop, I spanked him even harder with the fish spatula. “Thank you, mistress,” he yelped. “Do you want me to pull up my girlie panties now, or am I deserving of more punishment? Sh
ould I lick your feet?”

  My God, I thought suddenly, do you really want to experience being humiliated as a woman, Joey? Then cut your damn paycheck by thirty percent! Have a guy drug you at a party in college—but have an administrator tell you you’re overreacting when you want to report it to the police. Take your Subaru into the shop; have the mechanic ignore you for twenty minutes while he flirts with some big-titted seventeen-year-old—then have him talk condescendingly to you about not riding the clutch—even though you’ve been driving longer than he’s been alive. Have men at barbecues that you’re hosting interrupt you every time you try to contribute to the conversation. You want to really be humiliated as a woman, Joey? Be like my mother: die from ovarian cancer because the male doctor at the VA won’t take your complaints seriously and the insurance companies won’t cover “women’s health.” Hell, Joey, perform CPR on a man to save his life, but have a waiter ignore your cries for assistance because he assumes you’re just a Las Vegas prostitute.

  The air cracked with the sound of the spatula landing sharply on Joey’s exposed flesh, again and again. And then I saw something I hadn’t seen, really, for years: a giant, tumescent hard-on, purple-pink like chewing gum, poking out through Joey’s bloomers like its own animal. He hadn’t needed a pill for this—and I realized with a sickening rush that for years, he hadn’t needed me at all to get turned on. This was what he’d been doing with Mistress Tanya—and whether she’d finished him off or he’d taken himself into his own hands—that was immaterial. This fetish of his had always been sexual—I’d probably known this on some level all along—my husband had been getting off with another woman—with the help of a whole community that knew him more intimately than I did, in fact—that outfitted him, that supported him—he’d been getting his rocks off routinely despite me—in spite of me—by pretending to be a grotesque exaggeration of me.

  I swung the fish spatula across Joey’s ass with all the force I had.

  “Ow! Shit. Mistress!” Joey shouted. “Whoa! Hey! Regis Philbin!” The blows caught him on the backs of his thighs, the sides of his pinafore, in between his meaty shoulder blades where his bra was fastened. A couple of times, the side of the spatula hit him on his biceps and little perforated lines of blood began to rise on his skin. “Is this giving you a hard-on?” I shrieked. “Is this getting you off?”

  Snatching up the stainless-steel burger-flipper, I swung at Joey’s head, his face.

  He was crawling away beneath the lacerating smacks as fast as he could; he was huddled on the floor in the corner of the kitchen now, his arms wrapped around his head protectively as I swung the kitchen utensils at him at close range with full force. I hit him on his puffed-sleeved shoulders, his frilly maid’s bonnet, his upraised hands. He yowled in pain. “Regis Philbin! Donna, please! Stop! Don’t you hear me? I’m saying ‘Regis Philbin’!”

  “Regis Philbin? So what! Do you think this is some kind of joke?” I smacked him again. “For over twenty years, I’ve been cleaning the goddamn oven! For over twenty years, I’ve been doing all the baking and cooking for you, Joey! You think it’s funny? You think it’s degrading?”

  “No, I don’t! I don’t!” he cried, trying to fend off the implements and stay my hands at the same time.

  I don’t know what came over me. I was crazed. I was feral. I just couldn’t stop. “You cheated on me, Joey!” I shouted, taking another swing at his shoulder. “You did! And now, you’re just mocking me, and your daughter, too.”

  I was crying now. “You let someone else into our house—into our marriage—and you’re mocking me—” With a swing of the burger flipper, I slapped him across the face as hard as I could. The cracking sound was unmistakable. Suddenly, there was an explosion of blood—blood pouring out from between Joey’s fingers and running down his wrists as he clutched his nose. Blood dripping onto the linoleum, mixing with his lipstick, with his makeup. Blood on the kitchen implements. I hurled them at him—one after the other—they missed, hitting the wall above his head—then I picked up the lurid red heels I’d taken off and pummeled him with those, too, on his head, his shoulders, before throwing them down at him like two bright grenades. One landed beneath his thigh, the other hit him on the wrist—he flinched—and as I stood there panting, I saw the terror in his eyes. He was weeping and choking; I was weeping and choking—his blood, it seemed to be everywhere—his pinafore was soaked with it. “Oh my God,” I screamed, jerking back. “You did this, Joey! You did this to us!” even as I knew, somewhere deep in my lizard-brain, that I was feeling murderous—that I was volcanic—that I had detonated and something had just gone horribly, horribly wrong. With my feet finally freed from their torturous heels, I turned and I ran. I heard some kind of deep, animal-like panting: Leave! Get the hell out! Go! I pounded up the stairs to our bedroom, grabbed the first shirt I could find—yanked it on—grabbed my purse, phone, wallet—and shoved my netted feet into a pair of flip-flops by the bathroom.

  The next thing I was aware of, I was in my Subaru, an old VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS T-shirt thrown over my bustier, car key shaking in my fist. There was a growl, a jerk, and a spray of gravel.

  Chapter 4

  For a while, I simply zoomed over the back roads in my flip-flops. I sped past rusting water towers, overgrown railway depots, grain elevators shaped like bundles of dynamite. The autumn trees along the roadside flickered and leapt like flame.

  I found myself barreling toward Flint—with its toxic river, its poisoned children. When I came to a traffic light swinging overhead like a noose, I swerved right. I was seized by the idea of going to Pontiac—directly to that damn shopping mall—and driving straight through the front window of the Pleasure Chest. Trick or treat! I could already picture the ejaculatory shatter of glass, the mannequins toppling, the hideous crunch of their fiberglass torsos and limbs beneath my tires as I floored the accelerator and surged forward, bouncing onto the display floor amid fumes of plaster, mowing down racks and racks of lingerie—black lace and pink satin negligees catching on my hood and windshield until my Subaru looked like some insane, X-rated, sorority-girl homecoming float. I could smell the stench of gasoline mixed with strawberry lubricant. Best yet, I could hear Vicki screaming—Vicki with her electric-pink hair, who’d never played a guitar a single goddamn day in her life—and I pictured myself coolly emerging from the driver’s seat, still fierce in my bustier: Who’s happy now, bitch, selling sex toys? There. I’ve just destroyed your life as casually as you’ve destroyed mine.

  But instead, I gunned the car onto the ramp for Interstate 75 heading south, circumventing Pontiac entirely, joining other cars in a flood of velocity. I craved speed—speed and distance—I was hoping, stupidly, to outrace my fury and wretchedness and nausea. I grabbed my phone. I needed desperately to talk to someone. But who? Since getting sober, most of my “closest” friends had fallen by the wayside. My colleague Victor was clearly out of the running now. And my sponsor, she would only drag me to a meeting, which was the last place on earth I wanted to be—trapped in a basement, listening to other alkies bellyache. Besides, lucky me: the most depraved episode of my life, and I’d somehow managed without a single drink.

  Oh, but I wanted tequila!

  If I wanted to stay sober, though, I needed someone. Struggling to keep an eye on the road, I scrolled quickly through the names in my phone. My book club: the two Laurens, Mindy, Heather, Arundi, Abigail. Yet even in my hysteria, I knew: When I first confessed, the members would clasp my hands and fix their gazes on me bathetically. Oh, honey, they’d say. That’s awful! Yet as soon as I excused myself to go to the bathroom, their faces would go slack with shock and amazement and just a flicker of titillated glee. OMG! Overnight, I’d become the urban legend they told all their other friends: If you think your life is bad? Wait’ll you hear about this woman in our book club who beat her cross-dressing husband with a fish spatula!

  I knew this because if somebody else had just botched a do-it-yourself S&M session with her dentist
husband in drag, I’d be on the phone to Joey in a heartbeat myself, recounting every salacious detail, smug with the relief that this was not us. I wasn’t proud to admit this, but it was true.

  The financial crisis of 2008 alone had nearly demolished Joey and me. If word got out now? No one would trust us with their teeth or their kitchens again.

  I threw down my phone. Until the very moment I had caught him in his frilly cap and apron, the one person I would’ve sought solace from was Joey himself.

  My eyes watered. Perhaps if I went fast enough, I could break the sound barrier, burst through my own skin, propel forward into another dimension entirely.

  I hadn’t planned on driving to Detroit, yet, suddenly, I was headed to the epicenter—past mile after mile of scorched houses, bashed-in storefronts, shuttered factories. The late-afternoon sun torched the skyline. The Renaissance Center gleamed like the barrel of a revolver aimed straight at the sky.

  During my first weeks at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor my freshman year, I was amazed to meet out-of-state kids who proudly said they were from “New York,” “Boston,” “DC.” Only once they were heading home for Christmas did I discover that the New Yorker actually hailed from a suburb called “White Plains.” The Bostonian came from “Newton.” The kid from Washington lived in another state entirely: Chevy Chase, Maryland. Yet, ostentatiously, they claimed these cities as their own, eager to bask in the reflected light of them. But we Detroiters? Where were we from? Oh, Livonia. East Dearborn. Sterling Heights. Grosse Point, we said. Between the riots, crime, and plant closures, our families had hightailed it out of the city center like the crowds in old Godzilla movies; even Motown had packed up and left. Despite its recent so-called renewal, much of Detroit was still a modern-day Pompeii, an entire city abandoned in a stampede, the ruins of its previous life standing ghoulishly—empty factories with hooks still dangling from the ceilings; deserted restaurants with dusty barstools still riveted to the floor; burned-out Cadillacs still sitting where owners had last parked them; playgrounds overgrown by weeds; boarded-up mansions whose gardens had grown savage after their caretakers disappeared, so that they were now explosions of wildflowers and rodents; broken glass on the sidewalks glinting through the overgrowth. As for Austin and Ashley—I didn’t think they’d been downtown more than four or five times in their entire lives. Mostly for Tigers games at Comerica Park and coneys in Greektown. And we lived only thirty-five minutes away. Recently, Austin had begun asking Joey and me about what Detroit had been like in the “glory days,” and we honestly couldn’t tell him.